Laughter : an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic eBook

that is precisely why we shall look for it even in
those elements of the face that are incapable of movement,
in the curve of a nose or the shape of an ear.
For, in our eyes, form is always the outline of a
movement. The caricaturist who alters the size
of a nose, but respects its ground plan, lengthening
it, for instance, in the very direction in which it
was being lengthened by nature, is really making the
nose indulge in a grin. Henceforth we shall always
look upon the original as having determined to lengthen
itself and start grinning. In this sense, one
might say that Nature herself often meets with the
successes of a caricaturist. In the movement through
which she has slit that mouth, curtailed that chin
and bulged out that cheek, she would appear to have
succeeded in completing the intended grimace, thus
outwitting the restraining supervision of a more reasonable
force. In that case, the face we laugh at is,
so to speak, its own caricature.

To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason
assents, our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy
of its own: in every human form it sees the effort
of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is
infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject
to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that
attracts it. This soul imparts a portion of its
winged lightness to the body it animates: the
immateriality which thus passes into matter is what
is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate
and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert
activity of this higher principle, would fain convert
it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere
automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently
varied movements of the body in stupidly contracted
grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the fleeting
expressions of the face, in short imprint on the whole
person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed
and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical
occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality
by keeping in touch with a living ideal. Where
matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of
the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting
its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the
body, an effect that is comic. If, then, at this
point we wished to define the comic by comparing it
with its contrary, we should have to contrast it with
gracefulness even more than with beauty. It partakes
rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of
rigidness rather than of ugliness.